Satisfied with their understanding, he began calculating the best trajectory for their escape. As he did, he told Craig, “I hope you are right. As soon as we break and run, they will be after us in moments. If they are aware of the Dianodes presence, they will undoubtedly have a plan to capture us in place already. We must keep vigilant for it.”

The ship lurched to the right as Nothen began to bring the engines up to full power. It began to tear through space again at an even faster rate than it had before.

For Craig and the others, it quickly became a battle simply to stand upright. Seconds later, they gave up and found their seats again, watching as Nothen gave his full attention to coaxing all the power possible out of the ship, trying to put as much distance between it and the approaching horde as possible.

At first, it seemed he had caught them napping as they maintained their headings toward their former position, but then, as they watched, the lead ships shifted to new headings along with several others, performing an almost-perfect flanking motion to transfer the direction of the fleet’s motion after the ship.

They were no faster than their quarry, but they were behind them, with the bulk of their forces out and about in the vast void of space. Logic said their best option was to attempt to overtake them outright and failing that, to herd them into a confrontation with more of their ships. Either was a good plan.

The flaw in the former plan was that the ships were not fast enough to overtake them. The flaw in the latter was that the ships were visible far enough away for Nothen to change course to avoid them. The advantage they had was that because there were so many ships, they were able to flood the area with enough errant energy to make communication if not impossible, then at least extremely difficult.

That was standard operating procedure for the Bhrhin ships whenever they entered an area with an unidentified ship even if it was one of theirs. The reason was that so many of their ships had fallen into Rindivin hands, they couldn’t trust that it wasn’t some kind of trap, especially this close to the portal where most of the captured ships were held.

Of course, that in itself meant that if they were cut off long enough, the Rindivin would show up just to try and find out what was happening there. If they showed up in sufficient numbers, it would be fine. The Centha would easily be able to overcome the numbers, unless they had developed some new device they were unaware of.

Given that there were an infinite number of possibilities of what could happen, Nothen decided to concentrate on the ones that would improve their chances of survival, the most obvious of those being to find somewhere that either they could not follow or someplace they dared not.

He knew one that fit the latter description at least, but it held its own problems for his group. Seeing his face frowning with concentration, Leo asked, “What’s the plan? Anything we might like?”

The quest for knowledge should be eternal. The quest for power is.

Spirited away to a distant planetoid orbiting Wolf 359, Craig and the others awake in a medical compound being treated by aliens. Terrified at first, they soon learn that they are now pawns in an inter-galactic power play. And that their only chance lies in a retreat through a portal to another universe. Despite the danger, or because of the fact they have no choice they make the journey only to find even the trip is the most dangerous thing they have ever done. The question is, will it work?